


A Little Less Human

by Maidenjedi



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: F/M, post-episode
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2002-04-07
Updated: 2002-04-07
Packaged: 2019-06-19 09:31:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 538
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15507252
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maidenjedi/pseuds/Maidenjedi
Summary: Spuffy angst of the smutty kind.





	A Little Less Human

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for "Smashed," general season six.

Everyone had been so kind and so understanding, so "Oh, Buffy, you've had a hard time, you'll bounce back" that it had been hard to really notice that something was wrong. She started running to Spike because with him, another outsider, she felt almost ok. More like Buffy instead of Buffy the Undead.

So when he called her (on the phone? Not very Spike-like), she'd shivered a little, wondering what that voice would sound like if he was buried in.....

She didn't want to think about it.

When she ran into him in the alley, as he revealed what he thought to be the truth, as he hit her hard and not a little cruelly, part of her fell apart. He had understood, he had listened, he had kissed her....

"You came back wrong. You came back a little less human."

She hit him, thrashed him, threw his ass across the room.

And then she was in his arms.

The deja vu sensation of kissing dead flesh was pushed to the back of her mind. This was different, this was a way to forget, to leave the world.

She never wanted to stop.

* * *

She wanted this to be casual, she didn't want to feel anything. So she didn't think. His hands held her up as she held him in. The world started to crash down around them, she didn't think about the bricks falling and the plaster raining down. Glued at the hip, they crashed through the floor, lovers for whom the world does not exist.

She stopped kissing him, looked at him hard, trying to

discern why she was doing this. His eyes pierced her, drove hard and demanding into her questioning glance. She didn't look away, she just pressed against him, his black leather coat cutting into her even as she pushed

it off him.

This wasn't love. This was not wanting to be hurt anymore, but aching to hurt just the same. This was longing for an emotional void.

* * *

"You came back wrong."

It certainly wasn't pillow talk. No courtly wooing for this vamp. He struck a chord in her that was more poignant than love. It was in how everyone had been looking at her, wasn't it? Hadn't Giles treated her like a porcelain doll, only to abandon her, leave her alone in the dark? The rest of the world had gone on, and yet they brought her back assuming she would be the same old Buffy, Slayer-extraordinaire.

Spike, of course, noticed. And when he'd figured out what she feared the most, that she had come back a little less human, he'd used it to hurt her. No chivalrous love was this. Buffy could deal it as hard as she got it.

Was she less human? Did this prove it, wanting his cold, dead flesh inside her, invading her, making her feel?

This wasn't romantic love, sex that would fulfill curses and change them altogether. This was trying to feel complete, trying to fit in. If she had to be a little less human, what better way to do it?

She whispered it, not to him or for him, just to hear it said aloud from anyone's lips but his.

"I came back wrong."

 

**Author's Note:**

> Note from alice ttlg, the archivist: this story was originally archived at [Glass Onion](http://fanlore.org/wiki/The_Glass_Onion), and was moved to the AO3 as part of the Open Doors project.


End file.
